Emergency Conference Of The Fourth International

Resolution Of Solidarity With Class War Prisoners

Adopted by the Emergency Conference of the Fourth InternationalMay 19-26, 1940

Our revolutionary greetings go first of all to our comrades everywhere in the world who are victims of the repressions of capitalism and of totalitarian dictatorships.

Capitalism in its death agony vents its full fury above all upon its most intransigent opponents the Fourth Internationalists. Our organization is the object of the most brutal and relentless persecution by all the reactionary forces of the dying capitalist society. Our comrades have been thrown into prisons and concentration camps in the “democratic” countries as well as in the fascist countries. Wherever the Fourth International is even a potential threat to the existing order, its cadres have been hounded, jailed, and tortured.

During the sessions of this Emergency Conference of the Fourth International, Stalinist assassins raided the home of Comrades Natalia and Leon Trotsky and riddled their bedroom with machine gun slugs. Robert Sheldon Harte, secretary guard in Comrade Trotsky’s home, was kidnapped and his fate remains unknown.

We dip our flag at the graves of Comrades Rastroio, Galan, Martin, Llarza, and Cid, who were executed in the Spanish Civil War. Forty other comrades have disappeared in all probability executed by the butcher Franco. Others are in the prisons in Madrid and Barcelona and in the forced labor brigades. To those hundreds of our comrades who are refugees now suffering in the concentration camps in France we send our warmest greetings. The time will not be long until they will be freed by the proletarian revolution.

In the United States we salute especially those militants in Minnesota who have been persecuted by the FBI and sentenced by the bourgeois courts to the federal penitentiary.

Throughout Latin America under bloody and archreactionary dictatorships which continue to exist only by virtue of support from Washington, D. C., and Wall Street, our comrades are in exile, serving long prison sentences, or have been murdered. But far from weakening, their voices speak out, reaffirming their unshakable faith in the victory of our cause.

From Indochina oppressed by French imperialism, our comrades, hounded, imprisoned, driven underground, nevertheless make their voice heard die unconquerable voice of the colonial slaves who are even now gathering strength to break the chains loaded upon them by democratic imperialism.

In China, our comrades, even while in the front ranks of the Chinese armies facing the Japanese invader, are stabbed in the back by the agents of Chiang Kai shek and Stalin.

Our heroic Greek comrades, dozens and dozens of whom still languish on the prison islands of Metaxas, hold aloft with magnificent valor the banner of socialist revolution.

The concentration camps and prisons of Nazi Germany are full of devoted militants, implacable Trotskyist revolutionists who are standing resolutely against the executioners unleashed by Hitler. Our comrades in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and Holland are suffering under the heel of Hitler. Some of them have been transported from the newly conquered territories into Germany where their fate remains unknown.

We salute those young unknown revolutionists who, in Russia fall under the mausers of the GPU still crying, “Long Live Trotsky!”

None of these repressions, these tortures, these assassinations, shall stop us, for our task is laid out for us by history and we are guided by our invincible program of socialist revolution and not by the activities of sadistic police or of state terror machines, no matter how powerful and totalitarian.

The Emergency Conference of the Fourth International sends its greetings and its solidarity to all revolutionary militants thrown into bourgeois prisons, both the fascist and the “democratic,” as well as the Stalinist prisons. It calls on all comrades, sympathizers, and class conscious proletarians to put into practice theft feelings of solidarity with all the militants who have fallen victim to Stalinist terror and capitalist oppression. The very salvation of the socialist revolution requires that those militants who are so sorely tried should feel that they are supported by an international solidarity which is active and effective.

Today’s sacrifice is tomorrow’s guarantee of triumph. The proletarian revolution, victorious under the banner of the Fourth International, will avenge the comrades who have fallen, and rescue from theft prisons those who languish there.